Sen. James Inhofe Dishonors America With New Bill To Ban Same Sex Marriages On Military Bases

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe hasn’t given up his resistance to the acceptance of gays and lesbians in the military or same-sex marriage. On Tuesday, Inhofe and fellow Republican Roger Wicker of Mississippi introduced a measure that would ban same-sex marriages on military bases and protect military chaplains from “pressure” to perform such ceremonies. The two senators described the Military Religious Freedom Act as an effort to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, on the Defense Department in the wake of the December 2010 repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which ended the official ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military. “President Obama and his administration are dismissing their responsibility to uphold the law of the land by unilaterally deeming DOMA unworthy of enforcement,” Inhofe said. Supporters of the directive say chaplains are clearly exempt from same-sex services already, but some conservatives claim chaplains have been punished for refusing to perform same-sex ceremonies.

Some conservatives claim a lot of things. But when investigated and looked at objectively almost always turn out to be false. Don’t gay soldiers who are putting their lives on the line in the service of our liberty deserve more respect? It is worth noting that Inhofe is a member of the fundamentalist cult “The Family” and spends an inordinate amount of time in Uganda spreading his special brand of backward Oklahoma-style fundamentalism.

You can almost always count on political fundies to place their petty and parochial religious fetishes above the best interests of our nation.

About the Author

Wayne Besen is the Founding Executive Director of Truth Wins Out and author of “Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth” (Haworth, 2003). In 2010, Besen was awarded the “Visionary Award” at the Out Music Awards for organizing the American Prayer Hour, an event which shined a spotlight on the role American evangelicals played in the introduction of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

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